Thread by @dsamuelsohn

How Trump could mount a presidential campaign even if he's banned from office businessinsider.com/trump-2024-pre… by @davelevinthal ($) @businessinsider

Here's a longshot but still plausible scenario: US senators from both parties gang up to convict former President Donald Trump of inciting a fatal insurrection in their workplace. Then they ban him from ever again running for federal office.

Could Trump still try to mount a 2024 presidential campaign anyway?

Quite possibly, three former Federal Election Commission chairpeople tell Insider. At least for a while.

That's because it's easy for most anyone, from troublemaking teenage randos to disgraced ex-presidents itching for a comeback, to formally declare themselves a federal political candidate.

Trump could try to run again simply to grab headlines, something he's been known to do before.

Or he could do it just to raise gobs of money from the millions of supporters who've previously contributed. Again, not that crazy a scenario.

Or he could just jump in to play the political provocateur role the country and wider world have grown quite accustomed to.

Regardless, the FEC is the place where this kind of question would go for debate should Trump make such a move.

But the independent regulatory agency, created in 1975 in the wake of President Richard Nixon's resignation from the Watergate scandal, is really just there to process and publish the formal candidate declaration paperwork of congressional and presidential hopefuls.

The FEC lacks power to evaluate declared candidates' eligibility for office, including that of former presidents.

Say a 20-year-old files federal paperwork to create a congressional campaign committee despite being too young to run. Remember "Deez Nutz" from 2015? An Iowa teenager inspired lots of copy-catters who flooded the FEC w/ bogus & sometimes hilarious POTUS candidate filings.

"There's no law or regulation under which the FEC could refuse to form the committee even though the candidate is constitutionally ineligible," said Trevor Potter, a former Republican chairman of the FEC who now leads the Campaign Legal Center.

Determining a candidate's eligibility primarily falls to individual state governments, whose ballot-access laws are the primary firewalls between an ineligible federal candidate's campaign and that candidate appearing on an actual ballot.

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